Part 2: FOCUS ON COMMUNITY
Most of the essays in Part 2 of the collection, "Focus on Community," focus on the capability of CMC to enable an awareness of cultural difference among students from diverse backgrounds in terms of race, class and geographical difference. The authors of these essays discuss the problems and successes they had in connecting disparate communities through electonic means. In "Improving Classroom Culture: Using Electronic Dialogue to Face Difference," Pamela Gay discusses potentially explosive situations involving inexperienced grad student or adjunct teachers with minimal institutional authority who have charge of "students heretofore excluded, marginalized or silenced in the traditional classroom" (147).
In the collaboratively written "Fostering Diversity in the Writing Classroom: Using Wide-Area Networks to Promote Interracial Dialogue," Craig, Harris, and Smith discuss a "cross-cultural" project that connects students from rural Pennsylvania and West Virginia with students at George Washington University via e-mail and MOO meetings. Sharing a syllabus and readings, these students worked together, representing a collision of cultures within the U.S. They used technology to productively question and re-evaluate their own assumptions about rural and urban cultures. Margit Watts and Megumi Taniguchi discuss community building through narrative in "Writing a Narrative: MOOs and E-Journals."
Linda Hanson takes a different approach to theorizing community by investigating the sociopolitical framework of English in universities. Noting the theoretical split between literature (hierarchical view of knowledge) and composition (view of knowledge as communally constructed), Hanson hypothesizes that computer technology can support the latter model "by expanding opportunities for modeling the social construction of knowledge" (212). Likewise, John Barber's ethnographic work in "Overview of Effective Teaching in the Online Classroom" would be an excellent lead essay to any collection of essays for "newbies" to the computer classroom.
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